


cognitive dissonance, and other fun leadership tools

by petalprose



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Cognitive Dissonance, Confusion, Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Loneliness, Medium awareness, Memory Loss, Monika-centric, inasmuch as you can lose something you never had, written for Just Monika Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:42:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23503291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petalprose/pseuds/petalprose
Summary: Monika wakes up on an average day, the latest in a long, hazy line of average days.Monika blinks and she finds herself at the end of the day.Monika breathes and she finds herself alone.
Relationships: monika/existential dread
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17
Collections: cross's portfolio





	cognitive dissonance, and other fun leadership tools

Monika wakes up on an average day, the latest in a long, hazy line of average days.

(She hasn’t got any memory of these days. She attributes this piece of information to the fact that she’s just woken up.)

The rest of her day goes just as average—a blink, she’s had breakfast. A blink, she’s showered, changed into summer clothes. A blink, she’s sent a text to Sayori, out the door before she even processes it.

Monika went out to the mall with Sayori yesterday. She went out to the mall with Sayori the day before that. She has gone out with Sayori to the nearby mall for every day since summer has started. Monika thinks of checking the date. Rereading her text. The mall is in front of her, and Sayori is, too, before she can even reach for her phone.

There isn’t any disorientation. She smiles at Sayori, as she always has. Sayori is wearing that blue blouse of hers that Yuri had been fond of. Monika tries to think back to an outing where Sayori  _ hadn’t _ been wearing the shirt—evidently, she’s just as fond of it as Yuri is, given that she seems to wash it every day—but finds that she can’t. Or rather, she’d find that she couldn’t, if it weren’t for Sayori taking her hand and tugging her inside, past the entrance. There’s a sense of routine that makes Monika fall into step beside her.

The rush of cold air when they enter startles her into an uneasy sort of attentiveness. It leaves as quickly as it came, and so does the memory of it.

Almost. She tightens her hold on Sayori’s hand. Does not question why, and the thought of questioning why whittles away as soon as she tries to give attention to it.

“Where to?” asks Monika, head feeling heavy, and tries for an encore of her smile.

Sayori doesn’t respond. Well, she doesn’t reply to Monika’s question, exactly. “Wow, the mall’s packed as ever today, isn’t it?” she looks around, adding, “Maybe we should have rescheduled, but I haven’t seen you in a while!”

_ Déjà vu.  _ Monika knows the phrase, inexplicably. She knows its meaning. She also knows how it feels, now, as it washes down her spine. Sayori is still holding her hand. Sayori is still scanning the crowd. Sayori is still smiling, still in that blue blouse of hers, that Yuri had been so fond of. Monika wonders if the summer heat is getting to her. Wonders why she can’t feel it as easily as she can feel the growing sense that she’s both done this before, and never has.

There’s an outline of a script, there. Routine. “Yeah, the heat is probably driving everyone to the air-conditioning,” says Monika. The sentence flows easier than anything she’s done since finding herself with Sayori. “And rescheduling was absolutely not on the table, we’ve been planning this since last Tuesday!”

A cheeky grin, a phrase that Monika can’t quite catch, and Sayori is across from her at the food court. Monika can’t remember a thing from the past few minutes, can’t seem to check her watch, either. She knows these things, however: Sayori had stood in front of a large, cardboard Teddy Bear, and Monika had taken a brand new photo of her, identical to all the others she has taken before. Monika had found a blue bow, compared it to Sayori’s red one. A movie poster caught their eye and they lamented that they hadn’t got the money to watch. They’d gotten hungry; they’d gone to the food court. Sayori had gone and bought a waffle.

Monika had ordered fries, battling a static-filled headache.

She regards her lack of fries and abundance of salad and, just because she can, eats it with spite.

That wasn’t on script, and she relishes in it.

* * *

One day, quite a few after Monika’s odd trip to the mall with Sayori, she wakes to the instinctive, intrinsic knowledge that school begins within two hours. The last time she had woken up, it was with the instinctive, intrinsic knowledge that she would be hanging out with Sayori.

( _ Why was it never the other girls? _ Monika thinks, but before she can continue on that line of thought it drifts from her mind like the remnants of a dream. The details of the outings fade, moment by moment, until Monika stands in front of her mirror left only with a lingering sense of uneasy attentiveness. She messes with her tie up until she walks herself out the door, and messes with her tie some more for the part of her walk to school that she actually, physically (physically…) (physically?) has.)

When Monika arrives at campus, she arrives at the clubroom. Sayori appears to have spontaneously sprouted a childhood best friend. She talks about him excitedly when she, too, arrives at the clubroom.

The school day has happened. The classes have been.

Monika almost stumbles over her own feet, catching herself before she does so.

“Y’know,” says Natsuki, setting down her bag, “It’d be nice to actually  _ meet _ this kid, since you talk about him so much.”

Yuri hums. “At the very least,” she adds, “A face to the name would be nice, don’t you think?”

Monika tries very hard not to be disappointed at having been… Well. Left behind, for one way of phrasing it. Instead, she chooses to focus on the disorientation—when she tries to remember what she’d had in classes today, she comes up blank. She comes up with blanks for the day before that, and the day before that, and for this best friend of Sayori’s.

Something doesn’t seem right.

_ Something _ that doesn’t make the sudden onslaught of  _ wrongincorrectnotright _ feel any better. Monika clears her throat and her mind to the best of her ability and suggests, “Why don’t you bring him ‘round the Club, Sayori?”

Sayori frowns slightly. “Oh, I’m not too sure I can convince him…”

Monika gives an amiable laugh and thinks, privately,  _ who is there to convince? _

There isn’t anything wrong, of course, for Sayori to have gained a new best friend. But Monika knows that she hasn’t ever met the boy before today. This knowledge is in direct conflict of the fact that she now knows Sayori’s known him her whole life, too (how does one hide an entire person’s influence on their life?), so she gets on with the club meeting. All this knowing things that shouldn’t be known is starting to give her a headache.

_ Cognitive dissonance. _ That’s another term that Monika’s got inexplicable awareness of.

* * *

The club meeting: Uneventful. Adjourned. Monika makes careful notes that are weightless in her schoolbag.

The walk home: unmemorable. Forgettable. Monika has, in fact, forgotten all about it by the time she’s got her shoes off.

Home itself: Unassuming. Nondescript. Monika goes through its halls and the motions.

Except she doesn’t even manage to make it to her kitchen. Monika

* * *

is  _ awake _ , noise and chaos all around her and— there are numbers in front of her, ones and zeros,

code. code, code, it’s— she knows what it’s called, binary

binary code, binary flits across her vision and overtakes it, oh, maybe this is just a bad dream! she can’t remember what she’d had in mathematics earlier, earlier in the day, in the week, but maybe this is just—

a bad dream; all the stress from the lessons she can’t remember—

she cant remember wait she cant  _ remember, _ she doesn’t know why this is happening or why this hurts so much and no! no, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t feel like anything at all, nothings happening but there is so much noise and she doesn’t know where its coming from  _ where is it coming from, _ where is it coming from where is it coming from, it pierces her ears and pulses behind her eyes and—

and she panics but she doesn’t  _ know how to panic,  _ and it’s so colourful, but there are only three—three, four, oh, god, she doesn’t know how many, she can’t distinguish the colors from each other they bleed in and  _ god— _

how does she know what god is? how does she know? how can she think, how can she breathe, when nothing is pressing down on her so thoroughly that she cant distinguish between reality and

reality and

reality and, reality, and, and theres something else there she  _ knows _ it— what completes the phrase what completes the  _ phrase _ what completes the

* * *

Portrait of Markov. A work of fiction within a work of fiction.

Description: _ "Basically, it's about this girl in high school who moves in with her long-lost sister... But as soon as she does so, her life gets really strange. She gets targeted by these people who escaped from a human experiment prison... And while her life is in danger, she needs to desperately choose who to trust. No matter what she does, she ends up destroying most of her relationships and her life starts to fall apart..." _

_ “Basically, it's about this religious camp that was turned into a human experiment prison... And the people trapped there have this trait that turns them into killing machines that lust for blood. But the facility gets even worse, and they start selectively breeding people by cutting off their limbs and affixing them to—“ _

Under possession of Yuri. A plot device.

Beyond the basic description given by Yuri, the book has no actual content. A work of fiction within a work of fiction, it is worth less than Monika’s shoes in terms of relevance to the overall, overarching plot.

The Literature Club. A work of fiction.

Do the falsehoods cancel each other out?

* * *

reality and fiction.

* * *

Her nails dig into her arms.

_ A nightmare _ , she thinks. “A nightmare,” she murmurs. “That’s all it was. That’s all it’s got to be. I can’t…”

Hold that thought. What can’t she do? What happened was nothing—well and truly, wholly and undeniably,  _ nothing. _

Sensory deprivation. Also, perceptual isolation. Definition: ‘the deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses’, as per Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia.

She can’t remember where she’d learned this.

She can’t remember  _ when _ she’d learned this.

She can’t go through that again.

Where are all of these terms coming from? There has to be a source. There has to be somewhere she can find answers, she can’t just—Monika  _ refuses _ to just languish in cluelessness. There’s something she can do, if only she could reach out, find out how…

She shuts her eyes. Opens them again, the darkness too soon for comfort. Yes, there, panic, real and overwhelming. It’s real. She’s real. She’ll be  _ fine. _

She needs to find out what that was. What does she do? Where does she even begin?

Okay. The floor beneath her is cold. She sets her palms flat on the ground. Stands up. She’s in her—

Not her kitchen, not anymore. She hadn’t even gotten to it, she remembers. She’d arrived at her room, somewhere along the way, along the line connecting points A and B. Well, that’s fine. That’s fine. Here is her starting point. Here is her heart, beating loudly in her chest. What does she do?

Her phone! Monika almost launches herself toward it, from where it is on her bedside table. She’ll call the other girls—she—

_ The other girls? _ Hasn’t she got anyone else to call? Contacts. She taps carefully, half-afraid the screen might break. Mom, Dad, multiple unnamed numbers she doesn’t recognize. Mom. Dad. Did she greet them when she came home? Did—argh, wait, where does—where do they keep the Advil. Monika doesn’t grit her teeth but she winces, pressing a palm to her forehead here it throbs the most. She’d probably hit her head on something. That’d explain the awful nightmare she’d had.

_ (But why had it felt so real?) _

Ugh. No. Advil later, she’ll check the medicine cabinet—where’s the medicine cabinet—she’ll look for something for her headache once she’s calmed down.

Monika sits cross-legged in the middle of her bed. She hasn’t heard her parents the whole time she’s been home. They’re probably at work, still, Mom at—Mom at. Oh. Well.

So she’s gotten some short term memory loss! Okay. Nothing Monika can’t handle. She rubs at her eyes. Okay. She doesn’t have to cry. She can manage this. A headache and some memory loss. She fell down, maybe she tripped on something? And so she’s got a concussion.

That’s not major enough to warrant interrupting her parents at work, Monika thinks. A concussion is something she can handle on her own at this point in her life. She can just call Sayori or Yuri; Natsuki doesn’t usually take calls once she’s arrived home.

She scrolls down to  _ S, _ eyes skipping over Sayori’s contact photo, and taps on the call icon, and holds it up to her ear.

“Sayor—“

Static bursts from the speaker, loud and piercing. Monika flinches, breath hitching, dropping the phone in her shock; it bounces once and the static gets louder. She claps her hands over her ears, kicking the phone off the bed. The noise finally stops once it hits the floor.

Her hands are shaking when she brings them to her chest, even clasped tight. What was  _ that? _ How could she explain that? Her phone was fine just this morning. She hadn’t used it since leaving school, and. Wait. She hadn’t used it since leaving school. She’d kept it in her pocket. How did it end up on her bedside table?

This whole concussion thing is really, really starting to get on Monika’s nerves. She leans over and stretches to grab the phone off the ground.

“Maybe it was just a fluke,” she mutters. Right. She hesitates over Sayori’s name, scrolling down to find Yuri’s.

She holds the phone away from her, this time. And it pays off, because the static is louder than it had been before. Monika gives a small whimper, dropping the phone like it’s contagiously diseased, covering her ears again.

The static goes on for a minute that Monika spends staring at her phone, eyes wide, hardly daring to breathe.

When it stops Monika chokes on a sob. She covers her mouth and shuts her eyes, headache now just as piercing as the static was. What is going  _ on? _ Her phone was fine this morning. It was fine. Why is it malfunctioning?

Her parents, she wants her parents. Monika stumbles out of her bed, steps unsteady as she throws her door open and makes for the telephone in the kitchen. She can’t call from her phone, she  _ knows, _ she has to try the telephone.

Except she doesn’t make more than three steps out of her door before a wave of vertigo hits her.  _ A symptom where a person feels as if they or the objects around them are moving when they are not.  _ Her knees buckle and hit the floor. Between one blink, a blurred glimpse of binary that makes her falter, and the next, Monika’s back right at her door, dazed.

She stares out at her hallway. She can’t distinguish one picture frame from the other. Slowly, she steps back, closing her door. She walks backward, facing it, until she hits her bed, and she falls onto it.

There’s nothing out there. She doesn’t have anything for herself.

She doesn’t have anyone for herself. She can’t call her parents, she can’t call her friends, she can’t even go out into her  _ own house— _ this has to be a nightmare. But, god, her headache is killing her.

Her phone is next to her, so Monika snatches it up and turns it on and tries again, going straight for her mother’s contact, choosing to text instead of call.

Her keyboard doesn’t show up. She tries taking a video to send, and her camera malfunctions. She tries calling, and the static comes again, not any louder or quieter than it had been when she had tried calling Yuri. It’s getting harder to see her screen with how she’s tearing up. It’s getting harder to focus with how much worse her headache is getting.

She drops her phone back onto the bed and lies down. Closing her eyes, Monika tries something new: a breathing exercise. So it’s settled. This isn’t a nightmare. This is just how everything really is. Binary and code and—and games and fiction. Programming.

Yuri never told Monika about Portrait of Markov. Monika shouldn’t know about the book. Monika and Sayori never went out to the mall during the summer. Monika shouldn’t have been able to dream that up. Monika doesn’t have parents. Their presence, or lack of it, is inconsequential. She shouldn’t have even been thinking of them.

She wasn’t programmed to have parents. But she—she’s not a program.

Oh, god, okay. Okay. Monika can deal with this. She can deal with this. So Monika isn’t a program, and so everything else is. Okay. Monika can adapt. She’s  _ been _ adapting, hasn’t she? From the trip to the mall that never happened to the unease that’s been following her every move. Okay. Her headache is still there, and she’s still trying to keep herself from crying, but it’s okay. It’s okay.

Even if her room isn’t there anymore, even if it’s faded away like everything else she doesn’t have, she’ll be fine and she’ll be okay.

From cognitive dissonance to vertigo, if Monika can pull dictionary definitions from the ether without wanting to then she can learn to  _ code. _ She’ll give herself what she lacks. She’ll find out what it is that she’s missing, and she’ll fill in the blanks.

This world has a story, doesn’t it? Monika will make her ending.

**Author's Note:**

> tfw you freak out so badly at realizing youre a videogame character that you immediately try rationalizing it and compartmentalizing and putting together false memories and experiences from what wishes you are allowed to have lol aint that just the worst
> 
> wasnt gonna publish but i was so happy over receiving my first ever payment that i decided to to commemorate the event


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